Polar bear club students skip indoor recess, embrace the frosty outdoors at St. Boniface school

February 12, 2025 Canuck

When the principal’s office at General Vanier School announced the first indoor recess of the year in December, Marsha Leary heard how one of her students let out a loud groan.

The temperature that morning felt like –30 with the wind chill, the benchmark for the Louis Riel School Division to keep students inside during recess.

But the disapproval from Leary’s student brought up a thought that had swirled in her hand over the years.

“Why can’t we just bundle [students] up and take them out for a quick little run around the school, just [to] burn off some energy and get some fresh air,” she told CBC’s Information Radio Host Marcy Markusa.

At the St. Boniface school, teachers try to make up for the absence in outdoor time with “movement breaks” integrating activities like yoga inside the classroom during recess, Leary said.

But when children spend their days without leaving the building, Leary said the last couple hours of classes are challenging for some who struggle to focus.

“Being able to just move their bodies, it’s so helpful,” she said. “That heavy muscle work kind of grounds them.”

A group of children play in the snow. — Polar bear clubs have been running at different schools in Winnipeg for a number of years, and some school personnel say students who take their breaks out during the winter focus better in class. (Submitted by Angela Perez)

So Leary paired up with the student, and together, they wrote a letter to the school’s administration to create a “Polar Bear Club” at General Vanier.

The club is made up of students who get parental approval to go outside during recess when the temperature feels between –30 and –40 C with the wind chill.

“The kids loved the fact that they’re outside in a small group with an adult,” she said. “They tried soccer one day … now it’s the race of the teacher on the sled.”

At first, only six students signed up for the club, Leary said, and the group has since grown to 15 children as of this week. The choice to go out is offered from Grades 1 to 6, with the majority of students participating coming from Grade 3 and above.

Besides parental consent, children are required to fully bundle up and not take their clothes off until they are back inside.

“Usually, it is just their eyeballs sticking out,” Leary said.

Staff have volunteered to be outside with the students, and the time spent depends on how long either the adult or the children can resist outdoors.

“If the kids decide five minutes, they’re done, they come back in, if the adult decides five minutes, we’re done, they come back in,” Leary said.

“But we’ve lasted 15 [minutes] all of the recesses we’ve done.”

Hope for better in-class learning

This isn’t the first time a school has run a polar bear club. A spokesperson for the school division said the activity has been running for a number of years, but there’s no central registry of how many schools and students have participated.

The activity has drawn inspiration from Green Action Centre, a not-for-profit that has been running a challenge to get children to spend more time outdoors during the winter, including by encouraging classes to be held outside during the winter.

“Kids, like all of us, are meant to be moving,” Kale Fenez, coordinator for the non-profit, said. “You’re doing learning that isn’t happening in the classroom.”

But more broadly, when kids spend time outside, “they have time to get fresh air to sort of shake off all that energy, they’re more likely to be paying attention in class,” Fenez said.

Schools in the Winnipeg School Division have also created polar bear clubs based on staff interest, the division said in a statement.

Rockwood School in the city’s Crestwood area has been running its own club for the past three to four years — letting students, authorized by parents, go out for half their 30-minute break during indoor recess days.

Parental permission to go out is leveraged on the same level of importance as the child’s decision to go out, the school’s principal Angela Perez said.

“Even if they have permission and they don’t want to go out, we don’t make them go outside,” she said.

While half the school’s students have a permit signed by their parents, the number of them who are actually stepping out during recess has dwindled over time, she added, with five to eight participating this year.

But inside the classroom, teachers have noticed a difference with the children who go outside during recess.

“They are more ready to learn,” she said.

“They’ve been able to kind of exert some of that energy out and be able to come back with more of their minds and bodies are calmer and ready to learn.”

With no reported incidents of hypothermia or frostbite so far, the principal said the school is planning to continue offering this option to children and parents at Rockwood in future school years.

“We see that the kids enjoy it, especially our younger kids,” she said. “We live in a cold climate and I think it’s really good for kids to kind of build that resilience.”

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